Morning Bits

Useful to know. “President Barack Obama on Monday said his administration isn’t politicizing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and suggested Republican Mitt Romney is reversing his position by saying he would have given the mission a green light.” You have to admire the sheer gall.

Useless in convincing anyone who’s not already drunk the Kool-Aid. “The Obama campaign is ready to deploy Kerry as a top surrogate on foreign policy and national security this year, a natural task for the 68-year-old Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, whom many party strategists see as a nearly perfect foil for presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney.” Can’t wait for someone to ask him about his and Teresa wining and dining with Bashar al-Assad and the Mrs.

Useful for the Romney’s team. Advice on how to respond to the president on Osama bin Laden: “This isn’t college, and I’m not in Barack Obama’s fraternity. Notches on the belt are not what makes a great American leader. What the American people should understand is that a serious leader will do anything and everything to protect the American people without polling, hiding behind the United Nations, or standing on a deck with a sign behind him every time he does the right thing. I won’t make commercials about what a man I was when I ordered troops to take out our enemies, and I sure as hell won’t offload Guantanamo prisoners to domestic courts, sympathetic foreign governments, or avoid taking in high value targets for fear the CIA might violate their human rights.”

Useless to wait for anything of substance from the Obama campaign. On the new Obama slogan: “It took them a year to come up with … ‘Forward’? Haven’t they been watching MSNBC’s ‘Lean Forward’ programming? OK, OK, to be fair, hardly anyone does that. Still, that makes ‘Forward’ the most original concept from Obama since, um … ‘winning the future.’” Apparently, it’s too much to expect even a complete sentence.

Useful legislation. From Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) come “the Startup Act, a bill designed to knock down some of the barriers that stand in the way of entrepreneurs trying to launch new companies. Part of the law is an attempt to make it easier to raise financial capital. An equally important part, though, is an attempt to make it easier to attract human capital—the brainpower that is so important in a 21st-century economy, in which America’s biggest advantage is its ability to educate great minds and then give them the freedom to innovate their way to high-tech solutions. The legislation would do this by expanding the current—and limited—American program to give visas to foreigners with particularly valuable skills and education.” Makes too much sense, so will go nowhere.

Useless on the human rights front throughout his tenure, maybe Obama will be forced to do the right thing this time. On the Chen stand-off, Jamie Fly writes: “This should be an easy case. China’s future lies in the activism of those like Chen, not the sclerotic leaders with whom the Obama administration is so desperate to curry favor this week at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue. By showing a little passion for the cause and standing up for Chen’s rights, President Obama can take a small step toward beginning to make right three years of what has been a failed democracy and human-rights policy.”